THE SECOND MOON

Chapter Eight - Screw You, Life

The cold should have hurt, but it didn't.

Time went strange the second Drake sank beneath the surface. The lake wasn't dark the way a lake should have been. A faint silver glow moved through the water around him, catching along the Silverroot blossoms drifting past his face.

Drake wondered if he was drowning.

The thought came slowly, like it belonged to somebody else, and then he wondered if he was dying.

His heartbeat slowed until he could barely feel it. His limbs stopped fighting. He should have been panicking, but something about the water held him strangely still.

Then he felt pressure beneath him.

It pushed against the soles of his feet and the length of his back. It did not hurt, but it was firm enough to move him. The sensation grew stronger until it felt as if the lake itself had decided he did not belong down there and was forcing him toward the surface.

Drake did not fight it because he did not have to.

The water carried him upward while Silverroot blossoms brushed against his face and shoulders. Their pale petals drifted around him in the dim light, and for one second the thin silver veins running through them seemed brighter than they had been above the surface.

Drake barely noticed.

The pressure beneath him kept building until the lake suddenly released him.

He broke through the surface coughing so hard that his whole body folded forward.

Air tore into his lungs as Drake kicked toward the bank, but his arms felt clumsy and his legs did not respond the way he expected. He kept moving anyway and managed to reach the muddy edge.

His fingers dug into the wet earth while Silverroot petals clung to his wrists and forearms as he dragged himself out of the water.

Drake crawled far enough from the edge to know he would not slide back in, then collapsed onto the grass.

His chest heaved while the sky spun above him.

The Blood Moon and the Second Moon were still there, red and pale against the dark.

Drake stared at them.

"Screw you too."

His voice sounded rough from coughing.

He was still drunk. The cold water had not sobered him. If anything, the vodka felt heavier now, spreading through him while the ground seemed to shift beneath his back.

The Silverroot blossoms had already started drifting across the lake again.

They covered the surface in a pale blanket and moved slowly as though nothing had happened. It was almost as if even the lake didn't want him and had spat him back out.

Drake watched them for a while.

"You couldn't even give me one thing."

He had no idea who he was talking to anymore.

Maybe he meant the lake, or maybe he meant the moons. He could have meant his grandfather and every ridiculous story he had filled Drake's head with when Drake had still been young enough to believe him.

Drake laughed once.

"One stupid thing."

The lake remained quiet.

His breathing slowly settled, but the world kept tilting around him.

Dawson's voice came back first, telling him that his position was being eliminated.

Then Rebecca Shaw's voice followed, calling Maya her client.

Lucas's voice came next, telling him he couldn't do this right now.

Drake shut his eyes.

"Enough."

He did not want to hear any of them anymore.

For years, he had handled whatever came next because there had never been another option. When bills arrived, he worked more. When something broke, he fixed it. When Maya got angry, he waited until they could talk without shouting. When the kids needed something, he found a way to pay for it.

For three years, he had kept calling for Ronan every morning and every night.

Tonight, he was tired of being the one who kept trying.

Drake opened his eyes again.

The moons had blurred slightly above him, so he blinked until they separated.

"You happy now?"

Nothing answered.

He almost laughed again, but he was too tired.

The grass beneath him was cold and wet, and his clothes were soaked through. He knew he should get up. He knew staying beside the lake in this condition was stupid.

Drake did not move.

For once, he did not care enough to make himself do the sensible thing.

The Silverroot flowers shifted softly across the water below him. The sound was barely there, but he could hear the petals brushing against one another when the wind moved across the lake.

His eyelids grew heavier.

He thought about his car somewhere beyond the trees, then about the vodka bottle he had lost in the water and how much effort standing up would take.

None of those thoughts lasted very long.

The cold started fading too.

That should have worried him, but it didn't.

His body felt heavy against the ground, and the grass seemed softer than it had a few minutes earlier.

Drake stared at the moons until they blurred together again.

This time, he did not bother blinking them apart.

The red and pale light stretched across the sky and melted into one strange glow above the treeline while his thoughts slowed with it.

He did not think about Maya or the divorce papers. He did not think about Tyler wearing that new shirt in the conference room. He did not think about Lucas refusing his help or Lily ending the call. He did not think about the rent notice waiting at the apartment, and he did not even think about Ronan.

For the first time all day, his mind stopped trying to fix anything.

Drake lay there while the Silverroot blossoms covered the lake behind him and the eclipse moved slowly past its darkest point. His breathing slowed, and his eyes closed.

He didn't feel the change when it started.

That was the strangest part of it later, when he had the presence of mind to think about it at all. He didn't feel pain or cold. He felt something closer to pressure, steady and total, like the lake had followed him out of the water and was still pushing against him from every direction at once, reshaping something it had decided was wrong.

His last coherent thought was aimed at all of it, including his job, his marriage, his money, his wolf, and his entire miserable life.

Screw you, life.

Then he knew nothing until he woke with his face in the wet grass.

The sky above him was pale gray, with dawn just starting to thin the dark at the edges. The eclipse was gone, both moons had set, and the lake behind him was quiet. The Silverroot blossoms were still spread across the surface, but they were closed now, with their silver veins faded back to white in the early light.

Drake pushed himself up.

His hands went into the ground wrong. His arms felt wrong. His whole body felt wrong in a way he couldn't immediately name, like a room where someone had moved all the furniture an inch in every direction.

He sat up.

His shirt hung off his shoulders like it belonged to someone larger. His jeans had bunched around his waist and were sitting too low on his hips. He grabbed the waistband automatically, but his hand stopped when he saw it.

Drake stared at his hand for a long time.

The warehouse scar across his knuckles was gone. The pale line where his wedding ring had sat for eighteen years was gone too. His skin was smooth and unlined, and his hand looked like it belonged to someone who hadn't spent three decades using it.

Drake turned it over, pressed his thumb into his palm, and made a fist.

He stood too fast and caught himself against a tree.

His knee didn't hurt. His back didn't hurt. The persistent low ache that had lived in his left shoulder since a warehouse injury four years ago was completely gone.

Drake walked to the lake's edge and looked down.

The Silverroot blossoms parted around his reflection as if they were making room for it.

The face looking back at him from the water was seventeen years old.

Drake stood very still.

He knew that face. He had photographs of it. He had spent years watching it change in bathroom mirrors until it became the face of a man who looked older than he felt, with gray at the temples and lines that hadn't been there at thirty.

That face was gone.

The face in the water had dark hair falling across its forehead and a sharp jaw. His gray eyes were wide and completely sober in the early light. There was no stubble, no gray, and none of the marks thirty-five years of living had left around his eyes.

His phone was in his pocket.

He pulled it out with a hand that looked unfamiliar even though he knew it was absolutely his.

The screen was cracked from the fall but still alive.

The date showed the same Friday, the same year, and the same life he had gone to sleep hating.

There was a missed call from Lucas. Maya's last text was still sitting unread. The photograph of the rent notice was still in his camera roll, and the severance envelope was still somewhere back in his apartment.

Everything was exactly where he'd left it.

The years had not gone backward.

Drake West was still thirty-five years old, with seventeen years of unfinished business behind him. Somehow, he was standing in a seventeen-year-old body on the bank of Blackridge Lake while the sun came up, wearing clothes two sizes too big and holding a cracked phone in a hand he hadn't seen since high school.

Something shifted inside his chest.

Drake stopped moving.

It wasn't the silence he had lived with for three years. Something was underneath that silence now, and it felt like something that had been buried there for a long time, waiting for something big enough to reach it.

Drake held his breath.

Then, finally, Ronan spoke.